In collaboration with Magnum Foundation, the Photography Mentorship Program (PMP) at Bard College is hosting a symposium around photography, surveillance, and archives.

The event includes two panel discussions featuring Magnum Foundation grantees Oscar B. Castillo and Cynthia Santos-Briones.

Saturday, December 6, 2025 | 1:00 PM - 4:00 PM ET
Hessel Museum of Art
33 Garden Rd
Annandale-On-Hudson, NY 12504

Panel Schedule

1:00 pm – “The Politics of Seeing - Surveillance and Countersurveillance Practices” with Oscar B. Castillo and Julia Weist

• Oscar B. Castillo’s work revolves around themes of displacement and migration. Castillo will talk about his project Border Cruzadas, which tells personal stories about migrants through collaboration with communities affected by the U.S. immigration system and its violent enforcement of the law and power.

• Julia Weist is a currently a Visiting Artist in Residence and Studio Arts Professor at Bard College. In 2022, she became a licensed private investigator and, through her access to governmental databases, has created extensive projects questioning the use of surveillance data as an apparatus of control and intrusion of private spheres, challenging the types of agency that we are informed of and made to believe.

3:00 pm – “Infrastructures of Power, Mourning, and Resistance” with Cynthia Santos-Briones and Farah Alkhoury

• Cynthia Santos-Briones will be presenting her work surrounding the mourning of necropolitics along migrant routes in the U.S.-Mexico border, focusing on the deaths and disappearances of migrant bodies. A thread that runs throughout her body of work showcases the significance and beauty of how migrant communities have endured and resisted ongoing patterns of oppression.

• Farah Alkhoury is an Architecture professor at Bard College. The project she’s presenting “focus[es] on the architectures and landscapes shaped by military toxicity that persists in soil, water, and air long after wars end. The project focuses on three interconnected sites: weapon testing in Vieques, Puerto Rico; military deployment in Iraqi cities; and storage andchemical transformation in Portsmouth, Ohio. Tracing the infrastructural, spatial, and material flows of contamination and engaging with activist movements that confront these often invisible forms of environmental violence.”

Photography Mentorship Program (PMP) is a student-run mentoring initiative within the Photography Department at Bard College.